Posts Tagged ‘Electoral reform’

I should probably avoid speculation as to what happens after the election and focus my energies on getting as much support for the party. However, I would hope that, rather than make a decision on their own, the leaders of the Liberal Democrat party will hold a referendum to it’s members as to which party to side with and form a coalition government.

Building up from that, I would also like to see the party encourage/enforce debate between Labour, The Conservatives, The Lib Dems and the smaller parties. The priority should of course be electoral reform. However, I would like to see an element based on hand-picking the best people for the job in terms of ministerial appointments, and explicitly encouraging a politics based on consensus rather than competition.

How would we achieve this? I think the first part would be putting in place the single transferable vote and/or proportional representation, as well as making the House of Lords entirely elected. The second part would be to change the focus of this coalition term to cleaning up politics. Make explicit requirements for MPs to publish expenses, and to be accountable to constituents first if a certain number vote (either online or through petitions) against the putting in place of certain laws in Parliament. MPs should be accountable to constituents before their party whips.

In my opinion, the final part would be a complete overhaul of the House of Lords into a House entirely elected by the public through proportional representation; I will detail in my next blog post tomorrow how such a system might work.